Email Archive Migration Preplanning Checklist

An email archive migration is a complex project that requires careful planning. Regardless of the reason for your need to migrate archived data (more on that below), you must consider issues such as chain of custody, data discovery requirements, data conversion time, and—of course—total migration project cost.

How you address each of those issues depends on factors unique to your environment: your source archive system, your target archive system, your volume of archived data, whether you opt for a manual services-based archive migration or an automated software-driven migration, and much more.

We’ve prepared an email archive migration project checklist to help you plan your archive migration and thereby avoid unforeseen pitfalls. Download a copy here if any of these scenarios sound familiar:


-Business Change. Is your company going through a merger, acquisition or divestiture, or do staff or entire departments often re-locate between locations? Archived records will almost certainly need to be amalgamated, extracted or moved to reflect organizational change.
-Archive Architecture Upgrade. Archive vendors often have to re-architect their product to improve performance and scalability. This may mean you need to migrate data stored in a legacy archive format to take full advantage of a new archive architecture.
-Improve scalability. Are retrievals or archive runs taking too long? Are you facing major infrastructure upgrades to accommodate growth? If your original archive is not ‘up to the job’ of servicing your needs, a move to better/newer technology will save money and improve service levels.
-Reduce Cost of Ownership. Is your IT team spending too much time and expense ‘nursing’ your existing archive: restarting stopped processes, responding to help desk calls, etc? To quote a customer that migrated from a legacy archive platform: “with [the previous solution] we went from being full time Exchange administrators to full time archive administrators”.
-E-Discovery Capability. Is your archive platform failing to provide adequate discovery and litigation support services? Secure, audited and rapid transitioning of your archived data to an alternative platform or specialist service with the additional discovery capabilities your organization needs could save your company millions.
-Protection Against Obsolescence. Has your incumbent archive supplier fallen by the wayside? Will your original storage choice last to meet evolving retention needs? Although you chose the best technoloy at the time, if were an early adopter these are likely scenarios and you need to ensure your data does not get locked in.
-Change in IT Model. Does your organization want to outsource its IT services or use cloud computing? If so, your users will want to maintain access to legacy data via the new service.
-Better Support. Has the quality of service offered by your original vendor diminished? An unsupported version or unresponsive supplier could threaten the ongoing accessibility of your data.

For more information, visit our web site at:

http://www.flexnet.com/whitepaperDL/email_archive_migration_preplanning_checklist.htm

Google Apps, Active Directory Management

If yours is one of the ever-growing number of organizations considering a cloud-based computing initiative, you need to look at Ensim Unify's Service Manager for Google Apps.

Unify makes it amazingly easy to capitalize on the cost savings of moving some (or all) of your users to the cloud. Unify's template-driven provisioning and role-based access control gives you the flexibility to manage both on-premise systems (such as Active Directory) and Google Apps in a single console. You can create and provision a Gmail and Google Apps account for any user within your Active Directory infrastructure simply by clicking a single checkbox. And you can achieve further efficiencies by safely delegating tasks such as email list memberships, password resets, and nickname management to end users through Unify's self service portal.

Cloud-based computing is a hot topic in our current environment of frozen (or shrinking ) IT budgets. Ensim Unify will simplify your move to the cloud and also create additional cost-saving efficiencies for your IT department.

For more information, visit our web site at:

http://www.flexnet.com/Google_apps_active_directory_management/google_apps_management.htm

TransVault Software releases TransVault v4.3 with full support for the Enterprise Vault API.

Developed under the Symantec Technology Enabled Program (STEP), TransVault for Symantec Enterprise Vault™ is a Microsoft Windows-based application that enables legacy email archives to be quickly, transparently and securely migrated to (and within) Enterprise Vault.

TransVault consists a performance-optimized data migration engine that processes extremely large numbers of archived emails. Data can be processed selectively—for example, by date range, by group, by user—to facilitate specific migration requirements. TransVault can also migrate/re-point stubs from legacy archives to their corresponding items in Enterprise Vault, and it can reformat mail if necessary—eg, from john.doe@acme.com to jdoe@newcorp.com. And of utmost importance is the fact that every action is logged for audit purposes to help ensure chain of custody and discoverability of your migrated data.

• Symantec Enterprise Vault:
  - Extraction from 5.0, 6.0, 7.0 and 7.5
  - Ingestion into 7.0, 7.5, 8.0


• Autonomy ZANTAZ EAS


• IXOS?]eCONserver (Open Text)


• EMC EmailXtender (Legato)


• EMC Centera


• Hosted archive systems


• .PST, .EML and .MSG files
  
  For migrations to Enterprise Vault the benefits are compelling:

• Fast and seamless transition to EV:
  - No need for lengthy and expensive, services-based migration projects


• Legacy archive assessment:
  - Helps optimize new EV architecture
  - Prevents data loss due to corruption or ‘forgotten’ archives
  - Highlights potential problem areas


• Selective data transfer capability:
  - Helps organizations restructure their data in response to business and usage change
  - Helps re-architect archives to achieve optimum performance


• Direct and audited transfer directly into EV:
  - Preserves chain-of-custody
  - Avoids potential for tampering or loss of data during migration
  - Reduces migration time, with no intermediate storage required


• Optional address re-writing ensures legacy email addresses reflect any moves to a new domain


• Shortcut (stub) conversion ensures 100% user transparency and zero downtime
  
  
  For more information, visit our web site at:
  
  

http://www.flexnet.com/TransVault/Email_Archive_Migration.htm

Lotus Notes Email Monitoring

VitalSigns™releases a new version of its Lotus Notes Monitoring software. This updated version has a number of enhancements which include the following:

• Better, faster, algorithm for counting dead and pending mail when a server is processing messages quickly
• Ability to copy and paste Server Task settings from one Domino server to another for faster configuration (right-click on a server entry in the configuration tab)
• Automatic backup of the VitalSigns data files
• The ability to shut off alerts based on Server.ExpansionFactor (giving nuisance alerts for some sites)
• Faster startup of the monitoring process-- scans all servers prior to performing daily housekeeping
• Alerts can now be configured for Business Hours, Off-Hours, or both.

More About VitalSigns:

VitalSigns is a mail server and messaging infrastructure monitoring tool, optimized for IBM/Domino shops, that constantly checks the status of every server or service your email users depend on. When it detects a problem, it sends an alert to the appropriate person. It also captures performance statistics that can be used to produce reports and graphs.

For more information, visit our web site at:

http://www.flexnet.com/Lotus_Notes_Monitoring/Lotus_Domino_Server_Monitoring.htm